So a coworker stopped by last night and wanted to play my pinball and see the theater. He has his own theater/bar/gameroom in his basement. He mainly wanted to try out the bass shakers.

We watched clips from Act of Valor (boat extraction scene), and the Matrix (basically the assault on the building to get Morphius until the end). He and his 17 year old son were impressed with everything and now are talking about getting some shakers themselves. I told them that I like them to be subtle, but knowing him like I do, if he gets them, he will have them "rumbling" even when someone is whispering on screen. Oh well, to each their own.

I also, FINALLY, found the charging cord for my Harmony One remote the other day, so it was time to charge it up and reprogram it last night. Works like a champ. It is running the projector, blu-ray player, hd-dvd player, main receiver, bass shaker reciever, Dish DVR, and Lutron lights.

There are 2 things that I need to tweak yet. One is the "projector off" control. My projector wants you to hit the off button twice, so I need to program that in or see if it can be disabled in the projector settings to accept a single "off" signal. The other is one that I hit in the past and was able to fix easily. That is that the Dish DVR device (or the "watch TV" activity) do not have a "DVR" button, so I can't get to any recorded shows/timers. Easy fix, just need to do it.

Other than that, it is worked well, and sure will be nice to get rid of those 7 remotes and have just 1. When I get the color changing LED lights up, I will manually program that in as well and prevent an 8th remote from being in the mix.

I know that these aren't noticable improvements to the room itself, but after being over budget on the basement finish, then throwing in a bunch of expenses like grad party, college expenses, pre-paying for other kids' activities, and still dropping over $2,000 on our trip to Los Angeles that we just got back from, I am not spending more $$$ for a while. I do have some credit at the one local hardware store, so as soon as crown molding goes on sale, I should be able to pick that up as essentially no (new) cost, and I already have the rope lighting, so it should be a straight forward add-on when the price is right.

My wife also gave me the green light (for this fall) to add some acoustical panels to the walls. Thank you studio tours in L.A. where they had small screening rooms with panels...

So tonight I got the projector shutting off correctly via the Harmony One remote. I didn't add the DVR button yet though as I was busy finishing up another project.

The computer that was at the heart of my MAME arcade crapped out on me when we moved, and I finally got things rebuilt and running again. Slightly newer/faster hardware, and the best part is that it works. At least for the most part. I think that some of the ROMs on the old hard drive got corrupt as I was unable to play a few of the games that I used to love playing (Metal Slug, any version, were fun but don't work now).

I also fixed some wiring that got snagged and pulled loose during the move. So it should be good to go minus some of the ROMs. Some day I need to get updated anyway. I am on ROM set 0.128, and the current is 0.146... WAY out of date. It just has gotten so huge that people will sell you an external hard drive, and throw in the ROMs for "free", however they want $175 and up for the hard drive. They do come, usually, preconfigured with a LOT more than just MAME, but that is still a chunk. And even then, the front end (menu system) that people are using requires dual core CPU, at least 2 GB of RAM, and a powerful video card. Silly since MAME runs outstandingly well with 1 GB of RAM, a 5 year old single core CPU, and the most basic video card (because everything is emulated at the CPU level, not the GPU level).

I'm not ready to drop the cash right now when I have other things that are more important to me to spend my dollars on...

Anyway, here is a crummy picture of the area in progress. The doll house needs to move to some other place in the house. Not sure where yet. The foosball is in out family room. The air hockey and electronic darts are still in storage. Not sure if they will ever come out.

OH, the stuff under the pinball and doll house are the 2 other pachinko "Cells" that can be swapped into the machine on the wall. One is Star Wars and the other is Indiana Jones. The current one in there is called "Julie: The Pinball". Some goofy Japanese pop-star from the 60's and early 70's. Real name is Kenji Sawada Julie. Think Japanese Bee Gees sound... Goofy theme if you ask me, but a very "in demand" pachinko because of its playability and "fun factor"...

Insert a little soybeans, some cows/pigs, and you will be about right....

Fun fact, of the 3.06 million people in the state (I know, small numbers compared to a lot of other states), only 6.3% are farmers. So I guess that is a little more than 180,000 farmers, but 2.87 million people that aren't farmers. including me.